Internal Marketing Practices in Health Care and Their Influence on Nurse Motivation

Although internal marketing (IM) has been related to motivation in theory, very few studies have in fact studied this influence in practice. Therefore, this research aims to verify whether the existence of IM practices does influence the motivation of nurses as well as their practices in conjunction with whether IM practices diverge in accordance with whether the organization runs a public management or an innovative management model. To that end, a descriptive and correlational study in which 234 nurses participated from both corporate public entities (EPE) hospitals (public management model) and continuous care units (innovative management model) was undertaken. The results demonstrate that IM practices do influence nurse motivation levels. The results also show that some differences exist in IM practices between health care units with public management versus innovative management.